| Reprinted from Tue Liprary Journal, January, 1910.] 


THE PUBLIC LIBRARY AS AN EDUCATOR* 


By Louis Rounp Witson, Librarian of the University of North Carolina 


In an assemblage of educators such as this, 
it may seem unnecessary to give an expost- 
tion of the nature of education; for :t is the 
daily theme of our life, and whether it be 
the education of self, or of student, or of 
community about which we are sclicitous, it 
is the ever shining goal towards which our 
calm reason, as well as our ardcnt enthusi- 
asm, impels us. But inasmuch as we are 
to consider the public library in the capacity 
of an educator, setting for itself the same 
high objective to which, as educators, our 
finer impulses drive us, it is necessary to 
review briefly the nature of the objective 
which this the newest recruit te the educa- 
tional ranks, has set for its task. 

Education is the process by n:cans of which 
the individual is brought through training to 
an understanding of himself, of the life about 
him, and of the infinitely numerous relations 
which connect him with it. It is the pro- 
cess through which he passes in gaining for 
himself a proper knowledge of the various 
circumstances of life; from which he ac- 
quires the ability to adjust himself prop- 
erly to them; and by which he learns to 
know the standards of the true, the good, 
and the beautiful with which to measure 
them. It is the highway over which the 
individual passes in reaching an ultimate 
point from which he can view with greater 
clearness than he otherwise could life and 
the issues of life in their true perspective. 
To pass this way, is to become educated; to 
help another on this course, is to be an 
educator; and to be an educator in this 
sense, is to be Godlike. 

Under whatever conditions the extension 
of this the great work of life is possible, the 
lot of the worker will be one of rare privi- 
lege. In a democracy such as ours, in which 
every individual is a sovereign, the oppor- 
tunity to work this good work carnot be 
treated merely as a privilege, but as an 
imperative duty. Whatever may be our con- 


*A paper read before the Department of Libraries 
of the Southern Educational Association at Char- 
lotte, N. C., Dec. 28, 1909. 


ception of the duties of our zcevernment as 
to the extent of its paternal relations to our 
citizenship and to the direction of our indi- 
vidual affairs, we are unanimously agreed 
that it is its clear duty to give security to 
the persons and property of the members of 
the government. In order that it may do this 
without the possibility of disappointment and 
failure we are also equally unanimously 
agreed that the best means our government 
has to protect these rights is through the 
education of every sovereign individual; for 
if his eye be single his whole body shall be 
full of light, but if evil, his whole body shall 
be full of darkness. 

Accepting education then to be the agency 
for. promoting the kind of good inclicated and 
recognizing it as the foundation upou which 
our form of government must stand or fail, 
as a people we have spared no thought or 
means whereby it might best be promoted 
among us and by which its benefits might be 
more generally conferred on all. Our think- 
ing and planning have resulted tn the estab- 
lishment and maintenance of the school, the 
museum, and the lecture platform. which, 
together with the press, the church, and the 
home, stand out as the great educational 
agencies in our American life. Each has 
its definite place and each, in the way best 
suited to the furtherance of its specific pur- 
poses, is working out as a specific, yet co- 
operative agency, the salvation of the Amer- 
ican people. Each in the way which kas been 
found the surest and best attempts to con- 
tribute its parts to the making of the com- 
plete man, furnished unto all good works. 

In 1850, or thereabouts, the public library 
presented itself in America as a claimant for 
a place along with these agencies in the 
nation’s educational work. {t asked to be 
allowed to become an educator, to be per- 
mitted to contribute something jiurther to 
the individual’s outlook upon the life around 
him, By 1876, a date made memorable in 
America by the founding of the American 
Library Association as well as by the celebra- 
tion of the one hundredth anniversary of 


of 


American independence, its request for ad- 
mission had been granted, and in 1907, when 
representatives from every section of the 
country gathered at Asheville in the twenty- 
ninth annual meeting of the Association, it 
was brought home to us of the South as it 
was to the entire country that every objec- 
tion to its admission had been swept away 
and it stood accredited as one of the fore- 
most institutions in the dissemination of pop- 
ular education. 

It is in the capacity of an educator, then, 
a capacity to which it holds un undisputed 
right, that I wish especially to view it with 
you. As schoolmen, we have doubtless come 
to look upon the library, whether for the 
rural school, high school, college, city or 
state, as secondary to the school as an ag- 
gressive educational agency. Consequently 
we may have fallen into the habit of thinking 
and speaking of the library as supplementary 
to the school. We insist in driving two of 
our educational forces tandem fashion with 
the school in the lead, rather than both 
abreast, each pulling its proportionate share 
of the load. As librarians we have possibly 
insisted more than has been reasonable upon 
this latter method of pulling, and consequent- 
ly the load, through misunderstanding and a 
lack of co-operation on the part of the 
forces concerned, has not been carried ‘for- 
ward as far as it might. 

Whatever may have been our theory in 
the case, we are agreed to-day that each is 
indispensable to the other and that each in 
certain particulars supplements the other and 
is complemented by the other. The specific 
functions or missions of both, and the rela 
tion which each institution bears to the othe 
I conceive to be as follows: I quote, in part, 
from Mr. W. A. Millis in his paper read 
before the National Educational Association 
in 1902, and from Mr. H. E. Legler, in the 
current number of the LiprAry JOURNAL: 

“The work of the school is threefold: 

“1, To awaken aspiration, both general and 
specific, 

2. To give the alphabet of learning and 
activity —that is, to give the child such in- 
troduction to the several lines of learning, 
art, and enterprise as will reveal to him and 
nourish his special aptitudes, and at the same 
time put him into position to live sympa- 


thetically with those who follow other activi-. 
ties than his own, art 

“3. To train the powers of thought and 
expression.” 

Or, stating the ideas of Mr. Millis in a 
slightly different way, it is required of the 
school to awaken in the child an ambition to 
be well developed, to be a somebody; to 
quicken his impulse to know what the world 
has thought and done; to teach him to read, 
and, to some extent, to develop his taste for 
proper literature. When the child has been 
equipped with the rudiments of science, his- 
tory, language, and mathematics, has been 
awakened to the possibilities of culture and 
is ambitious to possess it, when he has 
learned how to read and think, the school 
has done the most it can do. Its primary 
business is to equip him with tools of learning 
and culture and the impulse for larger at- 
tainments. Beyond this point other agen- 
cies must take him. 

From the viewpoint of social science, the 
library has a twofold mission. It is the 
agency specially organized and maintained 
by the community to serve as an aid to the 
material progress of the individual and to 
promote the culture of a community through 
the individual. “Perhaps,” to quote from Mr. 
Legler, “ it may be said more accurately that 
its first mission is to give scope to its sec- 
ond. For, first of all, man must minister 
to his physical wants. Before there can be 
intellectual expansion and cultural develop- 
ment there must be leisure, or ut least condi 
tions that free the mind from anxicus care 
for the morrow. So the social structure, 
after all, must rest, to some extent, upon 
a bread and butter foundation. Thus it fol- 
lows, as a logical conclusion, that society 
as a whole cannot reach a high stage of 
development until all its industrial mem- 
bers are surrounded with conditions that 
permit the highest self-development. Until 
a better agency shall be found it is the pub- 
lic library which must serve this need.” In 
giving skill to the hand of labor, in offering 
cheer and a wider outlook upon life to the 
home, in rendering acute the thought of the 
community at large, it lays the true founda- 
tion of culture. 

And by the culture which it is to promote 
is meant more than reading and more than 


information. “It is that compounding of 
learning, taste, judgment, wisdom, and pe- 
culiar mental tone that come of being in 
sympathetic acquaintance with what has been 
thought, felt and done in the world, and of 
companionship, even remote, with the men 
and women who have thought. felt and ac- 
complished.” 

Thus both the school and the library have 
the same objective. Their ways of approach 
to it are frequently one and the same, and if 
at times divergent they both bring the in- 
dividual to the same desired end. The 
school awakens wholesome personality and 
social impulses, both general and specific, 
trains the individual in the elements of 
the social arts, trains him to think and 
to study, equips him with the elements of 
learning. It supplies him with the imple- 
ments with which he may attain to cul- 
ture and endeavors to fit him for a larger 
and more permanent growth to come from 
‘activities beyond its doors. The promotion 
of this larger growth beyond the school; the 
addition of knowledge, power ana culture to 
the individual’s store through the page of 
the free open book; the development of 
strong, truth-loving character both in the 
child and the adult is the special field and 
the larger opportunity of the iibrary. 

However necessary it may be fot us as 
schoolmen and librarians to define clearly 
for ourselves the theoretical functions of the 
school and the library as educators in order 
that we may comprehend the nature of our 
duties, it is equally necessary foz us to direct 
our attention briefly to the practical methods 
by which they may best fulfil their missions. 
As the special problems of the school are 
being discussed in other departments of this 
Association, I shall pass at once to the con- 
sideration of the particular lines of work to 
which the library should devote itself. I can 
enly hope to point out certa‘n groups or 
classes with which the library should espe- 
cially work without attempting to give any 
methods in detail, 

The library’s first duty, obviously, is to 
aid in the education of the child. Although 
its part in this special field is necessarily sec- 
ondary to that of the school, its children’s 
room should always be open; its tables and 
shelves should be supplied with the best of 


science, history, biography, literature and 
story; a trained children’s librarian, who is a 
teacher as well, should be at hand to direct; 
the mysteries of the catalog should be re- 
vealed; and the use of the book should be 
made clear. If the child is not reached in 
the library, the central library, provision 
should be made for reaching it either by 
school depository or branch library in the 
school which the child attends or in the 
branch library in the neighborhood in which 
it lives. All of good which the library has 
at its command shouid be placed at his hand. 
Furthermore, it should be presented with 
such knowledge and sympathy as will result 
in the extension of the instruction imparted 
by the school and in a definite contribution 
of culture. 

Its second duty is to the adult. It is a 
fact with which we are painfully conversant 


’ that less than 25 per cent of the children be- 


tween 14 and 20 are in the public schools, in- 
cluding all the grades, and that but one Ameri- 
can in a thousand claims a college or univer- 
sity as his foster mother. It is just here that 
the library finds its chief ground for exist- 
ence. As soon as the child leaves the school 
it should enroll him as one voi its benefi- 
ciaries and it should sustain to him and his 
father alike the relation of the great univer- 
sity to her sons. Books of knowledge and 
power, as defined by De Quincey, should be 
furnished this individual who has passed 
out of the doors of the school cr college to 
stimulate his aspiration to fit himself for 
larger, fuller life, the attainment of which 
is wholly conditioned upon the increase of 
his intelligence and the improvement of his 
character, 

In a peculiar sense the public library 13 
the logical educator of what I may term spe- 
cial classes. A million or more immigrants, 
mostly adults, reach our shores annually, the 
great majority of whom, either because they 
are over age or because they are not masters 
of our language, find our schools closed to 
them. The library is the sole agency which 
can touch their lives and aid in fitting them 
for citizenship. It should teach the immi- 
grant through books in his own tongue the 
principles of our government and a love for 
the Stars and Stripes which the school 
teaches the immigrant child. Professor 


Munsterberg, of Harvard, in speaking of the 
service rendered by the library to America’s 
middle classes and especially to the foreign 
laborer, says, “America is the workingman’s 
paradise, and attractive enough for the rich 
man; but the ordinary man of the middlz 
classes, who in Germany finds his chief com- 
fort in the Bierhalle, would find comfort in 
America were it not for the nublic library 
which offers him a home.” 

I have already called attention to the ne- 
cessity of training the laborer tor his work. 
His head must be trained as well as his hand 
if he is to win a competence for himself and 
leisure for the acquisition of a larger cul- 
ture. Speaking of this point, President 
Roosevelt sounded a very true note when he 
said, “Exactly as no other learning is as 
important for the average man as the learning 
which will teach him how to make his liveli- 
hood, so no other learning is as important for 
the average woman as the learning which 
will make her a good housewife and mother,” 
Here then the library has its greatest oppor- 
tunity, the enlightenment of the workshop 
and the worker’s home. 

The last duty of which I shall speak is to the 
municipality or state which appropriates con- 
stantly increasing sums for library mainte- 
nance. This service should be a direct one in ad- 
dition to the indirect one of training individ- 
uals for citizenship. I refer to that work of 
the library or the library commission which 
has as its special object the ccllection of 
laws for the guidance of aldermen and legis- 
lators for study and comparison in enacting 
legislation which will consequently be bene- 
ficent and wise. This field has not hereto- 
fore been sufficiently well cultivated, but with 
the more generally prevailing wish on the 
part of citizens that knowledge shall grow 
from more to more, that city and state shall 
rule wisely and well, that laws shall find 
their basis in equity and justice to all, the 


demand for its cultivation becomes impera- 
tive. 


To summarize, it is the duty vf the public 


library to co-operate with the school in its 


endeavor to awaken in the citizen-to-be an 
inspiration to make the most ot his powers; 
to give him the alphabet of learning and 
activity, to train his powers of thought and 
expression; and to supply him with the im- 
plements with which he may aitain to cul- 
ture. Apart from its connecttoa with the 
school, its chief function is to seive as the 
lifelong university for the individual, in 
which he may find freely, without money 
and without price, an opportunity for the 
continuous development of all his powers. 

This is the task as an educator which the 
public library has set itself. Although it 
incurs constantly increasing expense in doing 
its work, Professor Miinsterberg, in speaking 
of its effectiveness, says: “Admittedly all the 
technical apparatus of library administration 
is expensive; the Boston Public Library ex- 
pends every year a quarter of a million dol- 
lars for administrative purposes. But the 
American taxpayer supports this more glad- 
ly than any other burden, knowing that the 
public library is the best weapon against 
alcoholism aud crime, against corruption and 
discontent, and that the democratic country 
can flourish only when the instinct of self- 
perfection as it exists in every American is 
thoroughly satisfied.” 

Such is the work of the public library. 
Such is its record of achievement. Granting 
that it has not always met the 1equirements 
made of it, the faults by which it has been 
marred will be remedied, emotion and senti- 
ment will be aided by reason in promoting 
its cause, and we of the South, though tardy, 
will join those of other sections in utilizing . 
it as an institution making strong and perma- 
nent the foundation of our democratic Amer- 
ican civilization. 


